Reflections, reviews, and reports from the Chicago-based author, broadcaster, journalist, and arts critic

Thursday, 02 July 2009

Norman Pellegrini -- radio's greatest, WFMT's own -- 1929-2009

Norm Pellegrini, left, and the late Ray Nordstrand, at WFMT in the early 1960s.

We learned the news this morning of the unexpected death earlier today of Norm Pellegrini, the man who created the unique and superlative sound and taste and programming of WFMT Radio in Chicago as program director from 1953 to 1996. Norman would have been 80 on Saturday July 18, a day that will now be that of his memorial service. He was just 23 or 24 when he began his classical music radio career.

We'll have much more to say soon about Norman and his contributions to music and radio and culture, classical and more, not only in Chicago but in the United States and in the world. And WFMT is devoting all of its programming today/Thursday to Norm's memory, including historic interviews and profiles Norm made of Toscanini, Solti, and others. Free streaming of WFMT is available here. And the station has a Norman Pellegrini memorial page here.

For now, we recall here a song and a singer Norm loved and often played on The Midnight Special: Judy Collins and her "Golden Apples of the Sun." Norm loved her as a singer, as a person, as an interpreter, and as a great and haunting beauty. "Those eyes . . . ." he would often say.

"Golden Apples" was the title track of her second album Golden Apples of the Sun (1962, Elektra) -- re-released on CD by Wildflower in 2001 with her first album, A Maid of Constant Sorrow, as Maids and Golden Apples -- recorded when the singer was just 22 years old, what Norm used to call "Judy Collins before she was Judy Collins." Norm then recorded Judy Collins live in concert at WFMT's studios in 1963.

The song is a traditional setting of the 1899 Yeats poem, "The Song of Wandering Aengus":

I went out to the hazel wood, Because a fire was in my head, And cut and peeled a hazel wand, And hooked a berry to a thread; And when white moths were on the wing, And moth-like stars were flickering out, I dropped the berry in a stream And caught a little silver trout

When I had laid it on the floor And gone to blow the fire a-flame, But something rustled on the floor, And someone called me by my name; It had become a glimmering girl With apple blossom in her hair Who called me by my name and ran And vanished in the brightening air.

Though I am old with wandering Through hollow lands and hilly lands, I will find out where she has gone, And see her lips and take her hands; And walk among long dappled grass, And pluck till time and times are done, The silver apples of the moon, The golden apples of the sun.

Thank you Norman, for everything that you did, for music, for WFMT, for Chicago, and for me.